1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a method and apparatus for recognizing a character, and more particularly to a method and apparatus for recognizing a character in a display screen image photographed by a camera.
2. Description of the Related Art
As smartphones become more popular, the use of applications for recognizing characters from an image obtained by photographing a document, a business card, and the like through a camera of a smartphone has increased. Here, an optical character recognition function from among functions used for recognizing a character may have a high probability of being utilized as a multi-modal software input panel that provides another basic input function to the smartphone, along with a touch keypad, a voice recognition, and the like.
A method of recognizing a character image photographed by a mobile camera provides a user with a function of transferring a result of the recognition to another user via an e-mail or a text message, a function of connecting to the Internet, and the like. Specifically, when a character displayed on a computer screen is recognized by photographing the character through the camera, a user may readily transfer various character information from a computer to a smartphone and use the information for various purposes, thus improving user convenience.
The method of recognizing a character on the computer screen through use of a mobile camera requires a technical method that is different from a conventional method for recognizing a book, a magazine, and the like. When a character displayed on a computer screen is photographed through use of a high definition mobile camera, the resolution of a camera image is usually greater than the resolution of the computer screen which results in image noise that deteriorates a character recognition performance on a location of each pixel. Thus, the use of a conventional character recognition system is limited and an operation of sharpening a computer screen image and converting a screen image having a low resolution into an image with a high resolution is not appropriate for a general camera-based character recognition system.